🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility